NMT Calendar

MAY 2010
1- International Workers Day
4- Day of Solidarity with the People of Nicaragua
15- Day of Solidarity with Palestine
22-29 Week of Solidarity with Africa

JUNE 2010
6- Anniversary of Israeli seizure of Gaza
20- International Day of Disarmament
25-26 G-20 summit, Huntsville, Ontario

JULY 2010
26- Day of World Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution

AUG 2010
3- Day of World Solidarity with the Struggle of the People of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands
6- Day of World Solidarity with the Struggle of the Japanese People
18- Day of Solidarity with the Afro-American People

SEPT 2010
12- Day of Solidarity with the People of Zimbabwe
21- UN International Day of Peace, sponsors PTP, UF & CPI
23- Day of Solidarity with the People of Puerto Rico
25- Day of Solidarity with the People of Mozambique
30-10/6 - Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia

OCT 2010
8- Day of the Heroic Guerrilla
10- Indigenous Peoples Day
12- Day of Solidarity with Laos
19- International Media Democracy Day

Watercooler

SORRY FOLKS. If you think President Obama went “Off Script” at tonight’s State of the Union Address, ask yourself why he punctuated “I have no more campaigns to run” with a HANDS-CLASPED PAUSE. In the context of his prepared remarks, that sentence was a lead-in, not a paragraph unto itself. Watch it againt and you’ll see that Obama’s pause was a trap to goad opponents to applaud so that he could “ad-lib” his crowd-pleasing “I know because I won both of them.” Prescripted mishaps are common devices to garner sympathy for embattled performers. Given that White House speechwriters anticipated a hostile reception, you’d think they would otherwise avoid lines that fed the antipathy, especially a throw-away line of exposition. Both setup and punchline added no substance to Obama’s remarks, except to grandstand.

The US response to Ebola is “Doctors Without Borders” with a cheaper payroll, serving US imperial needs above all. Okay, the US has been rolling out SOLDIERS WITHOUT BORDERS since Manifest Destiny and the Shores of Tripoli, but President Barack Obama’s initiative to send 3,000 soldiers to fight the Ebola-Zaire virus in West Africa marks the ploy’s most farcical disguise: soldiers-as-peacekeepers-passing-as-doctors. Who knew Specialist 1st Class meant health specialist? If your neighborhood doctor doesn’t accept Medicaid, maybe your local garrison will. Poor President Obama. Most of the national budget goes to the Defense Department, so our federal resources are mostly soldiers! When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In this case, coffin nails, to contain the stricken people of West Africa. They need epidemiologists, we give them boots on the ground.

We’re AT WAR WITH THE ISLAMIC STATE! ISIS being not merely al-Qaeda in Iraq or Mesopotamia or the Levant, depending on who’s spinning your translation, but terrorists bent on establishing an Islamic State in Iraq and Syria! Someone is going to get an advertising award for the ISIS brand, though it sounds like an episode of Ad Men pitching a concept for Get Smart. What exactly is the West’s objection to an Islamic Califate? We already support the Jewish califate of Israel which has a regular record of far greater atrocities. If Americans are upset by the beheading videos attributed to ISIS it’s because ally Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow its frequent and similarly executed spectacles to be broadcast publically. Well, at least President Obama has abandoned the irrationality of a Global War on Terror, in favor of calling what critics have always known it to be, a War on Islam. When we’re finally candid we can admit we are defending Western imperialism from the forces who oppose usury, exploitation and slavery.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Not another war on Iraq! Not an intervention, not precision bombing, not saving a minority from massacre. If this rescue of Iraqis was about preventing a massacre, the US would be intervening with airstrikes against Israel. Last week President Obama admited that Bush-era CIA interrogation methods were torture. “We tortured some folks,” spoken with the same expectation of impunity as he now launches another illegal war.

Media propagandists can’t conceal the state of the union address for what it was, a pageant of creeps, a pandering freakshow, and a flaunting of the celebration that the American constituancy is peopled by idiots on both sides of the aisle.

2013. They are arguably Russian President Vladimir Putin most formidable adversaries, behind the scenes, in popular culture and in the international court of public opinion. The corporate press think Putin did it to rehab his anti-gay stance in advance of the Winter Olympics. The most powerful leader of the free world can’t find a single motive to offer amnesty to his nemisees under house arrest in London and Moscow, or throughout his nation’s vast prison system. At Thanksgiving, President Barack Obama jokes that the power of a US president extended only so far as to be able to offer clemency to Thanksgiving turkeys, so he pardoned two.

Everyone’s in an uproar about the sign language interpreter at the memorial for Nelson Mandela. Apparently he was illiterate, but what about the speeches he was tasked to translate, were they not gibberish? I guess the hearing-impared missed President Obama criticizing the use of prison walls and snipers. They would have suspected an authentic interpretation of Obama admonishing other leaders for not tolerating voices of dissent. Apparently also, critics faulted the imposter for his emotionless delivery: “He also used no facial expression to convey the emotions of the leaders.” So he got that right too.

Must we say please? “OBAMA, PENDEJO, POR FAVOR CLOSE GITMO!” When the chants on your march are multilingual, even in Colorado some people need the Spanish translated for them. Do you know what “Obama, Escucha, Estamos en la lucha” means? Is it true, we’re prepared to fight? This is irrelevant bluster from the mouths of SEIU organizers, paid to rally volunteers in spite of the futility, probably only if futility is guaranteed actually. Otherwise they’re Obama supporters, who assure everyone “This is what democracy looks like” and promise victory through electoral politics. Here’s a popular one: “El pueblo, Unido, Jamas sera vencido!” Really? Shout it with conviction all you want, it doesn’t make success inevitable. For English speakers who don’t drink the Koolaid that’s : The people, Kept busy, Run circles til they’re dizzy.

When was the last time YOUR issue was given the president’s bully-pulpit? Yeah, the outcry for Gun Control is not yours, and this campaign is not for you. President Obama trotted up a Sandy Hook Mourning Mom TM to rally the nation for action, of the usual so that they will not have died in vain variety, although she said only that the children “deserved a vote”, code for, it doesn’t have to pass, meaning this national conversation about societal violence is more kabuki. And how. Strange too how campus shootings are proliferating like pipeline spills, except the media are allowed to show the gun carnage. Before we’re done, it would not surprise me if Sandy Hook victims are compensated like 911 survivors. MNBC has labeled this issue “Massacre Control” as if school shootings have anything on air strikes. “For the children” only applies to ours.

President Barack Obama couldn’t deliver on the campaign inference he’d fill Abraham Lincoln’s shoes, so what do we do? Cut the Great Emancipator down to size. Portray America’s most lionized president as political operator, and distribute copies of the film to all the nation’s schools to cement the revisionist theme. Generations of visitors to DC’s monument will no longer recognize the seated giant, he’ll seem to big.

So, no, the twenty schoolchildren killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut were not Pakistani. That’s apparently what everyone is so upset about. I’m rather embarrassed how distraught Americans are about the Connecticut school shooting, considering equivalent child-massacres happen daily in Pakistan, victims of US drones, to no public outcry. In Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and all the far reaches of our multinational corporate empire, child killing is public policy, far from being a subject of public anguish.

Remember the “Financial Crisis” from out of nowhere when Obama first came to office? Now it’s Bank Heist, the Sequel, branded most assuredly with the assistance of Madison Avenue as a “Fiscal Cliff”, shall we call it FC2? This time instead of extorting a so-called “bank bailout”, the oligarchs want austerity concessions. Having looted the public treasury, they’re after the public wealth we call government’s primary social benefit to which the public thought it was “entitled”. So our herders are crying FISCAL CLIFF hoping to divert the public beast to a real cliff, another Buffalo Jump, in urban terms, a shakedown.

Dear Michael,
I write you as a longtime, enthusiastic fan, and please pardon me if the deference and affection I’d like to convey have been overcome by my shock at your recent emails. My question may sound rhetorical, but I would really like to know: what the hell compels you to shill once again for Barack Obama? Beside the campaign pablum.

If Mitt Romney’s candidacy serves one purpose, it’s to highlight what fools Americans have become. Without question, Romney shows his supporters to possess a thinking deficit virtually unfathomable. But more dispiriting, Romney’s opponents run from him like Team Scooby Doo from a masked ghoul, Saturday after Saturday never wiser. Tonight’s second presidential debate was no exception, with Romney contriving ever more spookier hogwash, to an audience and media taking it seriously. As a result tonight, people who otherwise pretend to know better were cheering for a “clean coal” fossil fuel president who’s “all about pipelines” because they’re afraid of a GOP foil who can’t prove he’d be better than Bush. If tonight’s town hall questions were vetted, can we not guess they were also ordered? Two subjects, the so-called Libya debacle and Anyone-but-Bush, seemed pedestrian enough to boost the illusion of reality television, but suited campaign camps rather equitably. Are we to believe Romney was left to improvise deficient answers? Any middle schooler could disprove Romney’s math, but that’s probably more schooling than we can attribute to the corporate media’s pretend audience. The public, polled to believe they’re as dumb as the level to which pundits condescend, think they have to chose a lesser of two color-coded evils. Most people, uncomfortably above the charade, are given to conclude that America’s foolish public could never govern itself, demand a responsive leader, or even crawl unaided from a paper bag. And that’s to confuse reality for television.

The Nobel committee snubbed Bradley Manning and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the banking theocracy EUROPEAN UNION. And you thought President Obama was a reach. Actually the feudal ogre EU was the logical choice after a war monger and the traditional Western war criminals and inhumanitarians.

President Obama nailed it! He had to lose last night’s presidential debate and how else was that going to look credible unless he out-Romney’d the reigning court fool? Arrogance would have been easier, and sloughing it off would have been unconvincing. Neither would have resuscitated Mitt Romney’s credibility. And while Obama’s brilliant turn may appear ego-less, it reflects the ease with which he has been betraying all his supporters with higher hopes. After turning his coat on every issue A-Z, it took a debate to infuriate his Democrat supporters? Where was the anger on Guantanamo, Immigration, Civil Liberties? They only care that he didn’t show up Mitt Romney. On the positive, they’ve all spent the next morning going over in their heads what Obama should have said, probably the arguments they’ll make in now revived voter-drives. Denver’s debate was psy-ops at its crudest.

— One would have thought that America’s first Black president would have taken the time and energy to ensure that there would be no repeat of Katrina horror for the remaining people still risking their lives living in New Orleans. If only to fully differentiate himself from the Republicans who did not build up the levees adequately under their tenure in the White House…. But Barack Obama didn’t bother with any of that! See Isaac floods part of New Orleans, city scrambles to rescue residents

You can see why Lance Armstrong fans are upset. Even President Obama is satisfied not to look back, why should the sports-doping authority? Lance Armstrong beat their drug tests fair and square, what right have they to retest his blood and urine samples, based on the probable cause of mounting witness testimonies, and now that superior tests can detect his workarounds? IF Team America ever cheated, it was fair and square. All our ducks in a row. If US proof of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction turned out to be fabricated, it was fabricated to the standards required by veracity tests of the time. No fair revisiting spilt lives. If Barack Obama took the USADA’s lead, he could rid American politics of all the Neocon cheats who still dominate the airwaves today. If Obama wanted to get lying, cheating, or taking unfair advantage out of the system. But breaking the rules, international law for example, the disproportionate use of force being a cherished national specialty, is the American Way.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.– It’s so dispiriting to witness the perpetual truancy of the local social justice community. They can attend prayer meeting circle jerks apparently, but when President Obomber comes to town, on the anniversary of the targeted assassination of the City of Nagasaki via atom bomb no less, August 9, those finks are nowhere. We saw teabags, potheads and Paultards with more spirit. You might be satisfied to hear that none of the other sign-bearers divined the motorcade route, but with patience we were able to see and be seen by the president twice, as he left Cutler Hall for the Olympic Training Center and on his return to Peterson AFB via Uintah to I-25. We would have welcomed antiwar colleagues, but what are you going to do? I guess advocating for military intervention in Darfur, Libya and Syria occupies a pacifist dupe full time, not to mention cheerleading for the Army’s “sustainability” PR. And you can’t speak up for immigrants, prisoners, women, gays, the environment, the poor and oppressed, if you’re sucking on Obama supporters’ toes for the duration of the election season. Some of the democrats exiting the campaign stop thanked us for our message. One asked: “Are you with the Justice and Peace?” Sadly, no, we said. They don’t turn up in public anymore. You might ask them about that, I recommended. I write this after the next day’s anti-activist trial, also a no-show by the excuse-making louts.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.- After President Obama’s campaign stop at Colorado College, the crowd clears, a reporter files his story, while an indiscreetly placed tree obstructs just enough of the Obama 2012 campaign logo to restore truth to the election season doublespeak. Does “forward” mean much more than the ol’ bla-bla-bla? –to quote a friend who heard his speech. Without the D you have “FOR WAR” which makes a lot more sense, and that “D” stood for Democrat.